Customer Service Strategy in Retail

I’d like to talk about the Service Strategy that you can use in your retail business to grow your business faster, to crush the competition, to take business away from your competitors. Everything that I teach is all built on what I call the incredible customer experience. To provide good customer service is not going to get you into the game. You have big box stores. You got competitors in retail coming from every possible direction.

The real question is, “What do you do with your employees?” Whether you have five employees, 50, 500, or 5,000. What are we going to build these people, so that they deliver this incredible customer experience? There are several things that we want to do.

Number one, you want to look at the hours, systems, and procedures you got in place. What can you do to make it easier for people to do business with you? Give you one simple suggestion, why don’t you open your stores 10 minutes early and close 10 minutes late?

Most retailers, the employees sit there. I’ll say the store’s supposed to open at 10, they’re waiting and they’re waiting. They’re never going to open, even one second early. Never. Okay?

At 10 minutes to five, if they’re supposed to close at five, they’re going to close 10 minutes to five. Okay? That’s one of the steps.

Number two, we have to be empowered. You got to teach people how to make fast, empowered decisions because there’s so many bad things that happen, so many problems. You want the employee to understand, this is a customer.

One of the other core things you got to understand, you’re no longer in retail, you’re in customer service. If you got 10 employees, everybody has to understand, “Our single job is to take care of a customer.”

The fourth thing we’ve got to do – is we got to teach people how to deliver this incredible customer service with something fresh and new, virtually every four months. We got to get away from the concept that, “There’s a magic program I can buy, a magic video I can buy”, that I’m going to dip my 15 employees in and bingo, they’re going to be perfect for the rest of their life.

You can go to any university, college, or high school for the rest of your life in, any country in the world, and there’s not a single course that’s going to teach your employees the skills and the art of customer service. If you want customer driven employees, it’s going to be your responsibility to invest in them, train them, and educate them. It better new and it better be fresh, if you want to change behaviors and attitudes and you want people to deliver what I call this incredible customer experience.

Thank you.

Look at Leading Empowered Teams to see how I can help you improve the customer service strategy in your retail facility.